This invention relates generally to information models that support sharing of data between design variants within a family, e.g., within a product family, and more particularly, to sharing design data between completely configured variants of the product family using an occurrence model. The model addresses, for example, capturing hierarchical designs made of nodes that can be defined as in-place or as instances of other reusable designs, and applies to any domain involving hierarchical reusable designs.
Information models, sometimes referred to herein as data models, are increasingly utilized in design and manufacture of a wide variety of products, structures and facilities. As the complexity and variants of a particular product, structure or facility design increase, such modeling can provide numerous benefits, including facilitating design and manufacturing efficiency.
For example, highly complex products, structures or facilities like aircraft, ships, off-shore oil drilling platforms and computational genomic structures are typically constructed using hundreds or thousands of mechanical, electrical and other assemblies, which in turn are comprised of numerous individual components or sub-assemblies. Collecting and managing data, in the form of data models, about such assemblies facilitates streamlining the design and manufacturing process of the product, structure or facility. Having such data also facilitates designing variants, improvements, and additional subsystems.
In addition, capturing such data facilitates a virtual product designing process. Designing and testing a product in a virtual environment (e.g., on a computer) facilitates reducing highly expensive physical prototyping and testing of the product. Virtual product design environments can save significant costs and time required for designing a given product, machine or facility.
Even things such as documents and Powerpoint presentations, which have many variations that share significant content, could be modeled using the concepts described herein, in order to eliminate any duplicated data that would currently exist between all the variant documents.
In creating such a data model, having a minimal number of objects to capture design variants facilitates both management of the data as well as scalability of the model. For example, and for even a modest complexity product design, the model typically includes numerous objects. If each product variant requires nearly complete duplication of the model, then the number of objects significantly increases. As one example, there is a family of 747® aircraft with a number of variants, including a passenger 747® aircraft and a cargo 747® aircraft. Capturing each variant design within the family in an efficient manner with a minimal number of additional objects for each variant facilitates designing additional variants, improvements, and additional subsystems.
In addition to managing an arbitrary number of assembly design variations with a fixed assembly structure, managing control of assembly configurations in the presence of assembly structure variations further facilitates designing additional variants, improvements, and additional subsystems. Also, distinguishing between structural variations and configuration variations within a fixed structure facilitates avoiding data duplication and data sharing between variations. When a common design change is made to a design with numerous structural variations, such assembly-configuration-control facilitates avoiding duplicate work and errors.
Bills of material (BOM) have been used to capture “product structure”. With such BOMs, however, it is extremely difficult, especially for complex products, to directly capture each variant in an efficient manner. In addition, and as used herein, the term “product structure” includes not only the product structure in the sense of a bill of material, but also domains including logical system design, geometric CAD design, manufacturing assembly sequence and any other domain where capturing hierarchical designs, with reusable and nonreusable components, is a useful design capture approach. Here, the term “product structure” is not limited to the traditional part list in a BOM. Instead it is a “generalized product structure,” which applies to multiple design domains, and carries a much richer set of information than does a standard BOM/product structure. A generalized product structure captures and shares design data between product family member designs with both configuration and product structural variations. It also captures and shares design content between versions of the design of a single product family member.
A data model to capture a generalized product structure should support making the user aware of permitted product design configurations which consist of required component configurations. For example, each permitted configuration includes a certain number of specific logical components, which specifies that no greater or fewer than that number of component and link configurations are allowed. Links between components are just represented as another type of component. Capturing the required components and their permitted configurations not only assists in creating the generalized product structure, but also facilitates readily identifying potential errors of omission or commission. For example, if a particular component or link is missing from a particular product configuration, or if a link is included improperly, these errors could be readily identified and avoided.